Bug by Bug, Google Fixes a New Idea

Danielle VanDyke, a young Google engineer working on the company’s latest mobile ad format, discovered that in August. The ad format was supposed to be ready for introduction in two weeks. But, as Ms. VanDyke told her colleagues in a teleconference, she was finding a bunch of bugs.

“I guess there’ll be a bigger problem in the future,” said Ms. VanDyke, a cheerful 26-year-old who favors hooded sweatshirts and ponytails, after giving her colleagues the news. “O.K. Must come up with a solution faster,” she said, almost to herself.

Google seems to spit out interesting new technologies so easily, they could be made on an assembly line. When Ms. VanDyke and her cohorts allowed a reporter to sit in on their meetings, though, Google’s development process appeared a little more haphazard.

On Monday, six weeks after Ms. VanDyke’s team was supposed to have the project ready, Google plans to announce what they were working on: a new feature of AdSense for mobile Web sites. It lets mobile publishers run special Google text ads on their sites when the site is visited by a smartphone. But instead of the basic text ads shown on regular cellphone Web sites, the ads come in different sizes, with more sophisticated design, and can include small images.

The result: Google makes a better-looking text ad, advertisers can send ads only to high-end phones, and publishers (and Google) potentially get more money for ads, since high-end users can be more valuable.

Google is throwing itself behind mobile ads for smartphones. The company’s advertising strategy “bet very big on these more sophisticated handsets,” said Vic Gundotra, vice president for engineering at Google.

Google may be betting, but analysts are not. Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, released a report last week saying that although mobile usage was growing, revenue potential was limited. Mr. Lindsay estimated that even in 2013, mobile search in the United States would bring in less than 2 percent of projected Google revenues for that year, around $650 million.

Back in August, Ms. VanDyke was not worried about 2013 — she needed to finish this project quickly. She had joined Google out of college, at Michigan Technological University, and had been working on desktop ads for three years. The job was demanding — she had little time to spend with her husband, whom she married after her junior year, and her dogs Presley and A’Kasha, named after a vampire in an Anne Rice novel. Still, she wanted to try something new, and volunteered for the mobile-engineering post in the spring.

Photo

Jennifer Lin, left, and Danielle VanDyke, both engineers at Google, design ads for smartphones.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

“I think of all programs as being logic puzzles, having a little Rubik’s cube on your screen,” she said. “And mobile really seemed like a great area of Google, because there’s so much development there. It’s an area where we’ve got all these huge leaps and bounds to make.”

On Tuesday, Aug. 11, which was supposed to be two weeks before the ads’ introduction, she and a group of marketers, engineers and sales people, most of them in Mountain View, Calif., were reviewing their progress in a Web conference.

Paul Feng, group product manager for mobile ads, asked Ms. VanDyke to update the group. She was using a type of coding that instructed the Web page to pull a piece of content from another source, in this case Google’s ad server. But she had never done this type of programming before, and was having trouble getting the ad to align properly. “Did that make sense?” she asked.

It seemed to. The other employees jumped in, arguing over whether this should be positioned as a new product feature or a new product, and asking for data for advertisers.

“It depends on how the testing goes,” she replied. “We’re not expecting any disasters, but you never expect any disasters.”

By the group meeting the next week, everything was still on track.

“I think we have a few smallish issues,” Mr. Feng began.

Ms. VanDyke reviewed some: the Palm Pre was so new that it had not been in the list of high-end phones that the program used, so she was fixing that. And she had found that one Chinese carrier did not pass information about the phone type to the Google server, so Ms. VanDyke told the program that requests from that carrier should result only in simple ads.

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An Apple iPhone displays an AdSense mobile ad.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

“Because there were a couple of changes like the Chinese change, the soonest we could launch is next Wednesday,” Ms. VanDyke said, referring to Aug. 26.

The marketing people said they were ready, with a blog announcement and information for sales people.

But Aug. 26 came and went, and there was no announcement.

Google tests its programs on a tiny percentage of live traffic before making them publicly available. New code is pulled in once a week, to make updates smoother. The engineers had missed the weekly rollout, then the Labor Day holiday caused another delay.

The program was finally ready for testing in September. Mr. Sugiura had found four publishers to test the new ads and run the basic ads alongside them, as a control. Ms. VanDyke needed a statistically significant result to prove the ads worked, and that they worked with all types of publishers, in all 27 countries where this new feature would be offered, and in all the programming languages publishers might use.

Since the basic ads would continue to run, she also had to make sure that those were still working on midrange phones, even as the new ads were being devised.

The testing continued longer than she expected: she was not familiar with this type of experiment and had set up certain instructions incorrectly; also, some unpopular old phones had not been classified as midrange phones in the program.

Finally, by the end of September, the team thought it had worked out all the bugs, and set Oct. 5 for the formal introduction. Then, in a move they had not seen coming, Yahoo made a similar announcement, saying last Tuesday that it was now running special search ads on certain high-end phones.

Ms. VanDyke did not seem too concerned — she was away for the week, representing Google at a conference in Arizona, and had other things to worry about. Once the product came out, she wanted to make more changes: different sizes of ads, and narrower ads for pages with borders, for instance. And Mr. Gundotra eventually wants mobile ads to be as useful as possible, like a shoe ad that gives the location of the nearest store carrying the shoes.

But Ms. VanDyke would have to tackle those adjustments in her spare time.

“I’m already starting on another mobile project,” she said in a phone call from Tucson. “They like to keep us going on one to three projects at a time.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2009, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bug by Bug, Google Fixes A New Idea. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe